There was not a single concession to the actual calendar year during Charles Bradley’s sweat-soaked, supercharged soul revival at the Virgin Mobile Corona Theatre Monday night. Inside the Corona’s walls, it was 1966 for an hour and 40 minutes.

Bradley, at 64, is from that era. He was 18 when Percy Sledge released When a Man Loves a Woman. Most of the audience members packing the theatre Monday night appeared to be in their late 20s or early 30s and were probably conceived while Sledge’s magnificent torch ballad was playing on a golden oldies station.

Typically for blues and soul concerts, those in attendance were virtually all white. There’s a story somewhere on why two such seminal genres created by black artists appear to have been disowned by so many black music lovers.

At any rate, the density of the crowd at Bradley’s astonishing performance said something about their craving for authenticity, or maybe the generally sorry state of mainstream R&B as we know it today. Or maybe the fact that the Mötley Crüe show at the Bell Centre was not the most enticing throwback option for everybody. Take your pick. However you cut it, there was barely room to lift your pint at Bradley’s show. The jungle telegraph had worked its magic, without much media hype.

“Baby, baby, gotta gotta have it,,” Bradley exclaimed during one of the few covers, Clarence Carter’s Slip Away, as himself he began to slip away, at least from the text. “C’mon darlin’!,” he pleaded before letting a James Brown scream pierce the air. “C’mon, darlin!,” he repeated, following that up with the requisite “Ungh!!,” as his attentive band, the Extraordinaires (all-white as well), punctuated his every demand.

This is, in a nutshell, what the fans came for.

That, and the moves. Bradley has `em all: the dropping to the knees, the tossing of the mic stand and catching it on the rebound, the hyperactive footwork, the twirls, the self-caressing hands, the flailing arms and the cool steps.

“Do you want to go to church now?,” he asked before he and the band kicked into a smouldering How Long, a cousin of Brown’s It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World. And the congregation couldn’t have been more willing. From the explosive opening ballad Crying in the Chapel, through the impossibly joyous You Put the Flame On It, down to to the closing one-two punch of Victim of Love and the deliriously-received autobiographical Why Is It So Hard?, they were washed in the waters. With every on-the-one rhythm and funky backbeat, each burst of tight horns, all driving bass lines and the extended band vamps as Bradley took them on a journey, they were healed.

For Bradley, who was barely heard of until his debut album was released only two years ago, it must have felt like being born again.

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